Bezos, the former CEO of Amazon.com Inc, is
due to be part of a four-person crew for a planned 11-minute ride to the edge
of space on Tuesday inside his company Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft,
another milestone in the nascent and potentially lucrative space tourism
sector.
He is set to be joined by his brother and
private equity executive Mark Bezos, trailblazing octogenarian woman aviator
Wally Funk and an as-yet-unidentified person who paid $28 million for a spot
aboard the spacecraft, scheduled to launch from a West Texas site.
New Shepard is a 60-foot-tall
(18.3-meters-tall) and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be
piloted from inside the spacecraft. The crew is set to include only civilians
and none of Blue Origin's employees or staff astronauts, three people familiar
with the company's plans told Reuters.
Blue Origin's astronauts include NASA space
shuttle veteran Nicholas Patrick.
"To see the Earth from space, it
changes you, it changes your relationship with this planet, with
humanity," Bezos said in a video last month discussing the flight.
There has never before been a fully
autonomous suborbital or orbital flight with an all-civilian crew, Teal Group
space industry analyst Marco Caceres said.
Branson, the British billionaire
businessman, was aboard his company Virgin Galactic's rocket plane for its
pioneering suborbital flight from New Mexico on Sunday. The Virgin Galactic
flight included two pilots, as well as the company's chief astronaut instructor
and its lead operations engineer.
New Shepard lifts off from a standing
position on a launch pad, like traditional rocket launches. With Virgin
Galactic, a rocket-powered spaceplane was dropped from a carrier plane in
mid-air.
New Shepard, like Virgin Galactic's flight,
will not enter into orbit around Earth, but will take the passengers some 62
miles up (100 km) before the capsule returns by parachute. Virgin Galactic's
flight reached 53 miles (86 km) above Earth.
Billionaire businessman Elon Musk's space
transportation company SpaceX is planning an even-more-ambitious mission in
September, sending an all-civilian crew for a several-day orbital flight aboard
its Crew Dragon capsule.
'SIMPLE MATH'
Blue Origin's flight is two decades in the
making. Bezos founded the company in 2000. A pilotless craft was a financial
strategy adopted by Blue Origin executives years ago.
"It's simple math," said one of
the people familiar with the company's thinking. "If you design a system
so that you don't need a pilot or a co-pilot you can have more paying
customers."
New Shepard can accommodate six people.
Blue Origin and industry insiders had previously discussed company employees
going up on the first flight.
A Blue Origin spokesperson confirmed the
decision was made for four seats to offer an enhanced customer experience for
the first flight.
The decision to skip over Blue Origin's
staff astronauts and technical experts has caused frustration for some company
insiders who viewed the first crewed flight as a crucial opportunity to gather
data and technical feedback for a program in its infancy, and to evaluate the
experience for future paying customers, the sources said.
A seasoned astronaut would provide a
calming presence for civilian crew members as New Shepard blasts off at speeds
upwards of 2,200 miles (3,540 km) per hour, the sources added.
The crew members will receive two days of
training. Blue Origin has assigned two staff members, on the ground, to help
the passengers strap in and to provide point-by-point instructions over
headsets during the mission.
"It's kind of like getting on a ride
at an amusement park," Caceres said. "You just trust that everything
has been checked out, is in good working order ... and you just sit back and
enjoy the ride."
Some industry sources have expressed
concerns that passengers - overwhelmed by the experience or in a state of
euphoria - could be rattled by routine noises, miss key instructions, pass out
or injure themselves floating around the cabin, potentially dangerous scenarios
a trained astronaut could respond to.
Funk, 82, was one of 13 women who passed
the same rigorous testing as the Mercury Seven male astronauts in NASA's 1960s
space program but were denied the chance to become astronauts because of their
gender.
Proving the safety of space travel is
important to developing what Swiss investment bank UBS estimates will be a $3
billion annual tourism market a decade from now.
"One of the main goals of the New
Shepard mission is to demonstrate that going to suborbital space is perfectly
safe for the average person," Caceres said. "So there is a benefit to
having as many average people on these flights as possible."
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